Page:Life Amongst the Modocs.djvu/357

 bove my

head. I was now not so helpless. I was not alone. This knife was more to me than all the lawyers.

I will kill that dreadful jailer with this knife some night when he comes in with my supper, I said, pass out, slip into town, mount a horse and escape to the mountains. I lay down at last, hid the knife in my bosom, and hugged it till I fell asleep.

Paquita came early the next night. Indians are too cunning to come twice at the same hour.

I had done nothing all day. This time she spoke and told me that the bars must be filed and cut away, that this was now the only hope, since all other attempts of hers had failed. An Indian war rior was waiting, she said, with horses out of town ; only get the bars away and we could almost step from the house-top to the steep hill-side, and then all would be well.

She had hacked two thin knives together, making a kind of saw, and we set to work. The bars were an inch in diameter, but made of soft iron, and the knife-blades laid hold like vipers.

At dawn she filled up the little gashes we had cut across the bars with a substance she had prepared just the colour of the rusty bars, and again dis appeared.

For more than a week we kept at this work. No one passed on the brushy hill-side or dwelt there, and we were never disturbed. At last three bars were loosened, and on Saturday night, when, as was then the custom, the men of the city, office